Ristretto | I Know What You Did Last Summer

It’s iced coffee season, which in New York means hitting the cold brew.

If you don’t know what cold brew is, then you haven’t been paying attention. The steep-and-strain method of making coffee without hot water, a rare sighting in New York as recently as 2010, came into fashion last year, and now it’s as easy to find as a sailor-stripe shirt: it’s sold by the stubby and the growler, bottled as concentrate or already mixed with milk, available on tap or in an ice pop. Cold brew is now as much a part of the New York summer as the fragrant streets of Midtown and the Mister Softee jingle.

And yet some of coffee’s heavy hitters feel that cold brew is a mistake — they say it’s flat and featureless, a good way to turn remarkable coffee beans into unremarkable coffee. It’s for amateurs. According to them, we should be making ice brew.

Ice brew is just a variation on drip coffee (what’s called “pour over” these days), in which you brew directly over ice. The hot coffee drips onto the cold cubes and cools instantly — the hot water quickly extracts more flavor from coffee grounds (cold brewing takes longer, which is why it sits overnight), and the rapid cooling means that the coffee doesn’t have the time to develop the unpleasantly harsh flavors you get from slowly chilling hot coffee in a refrigerator. The benefits? You get all the vivid, fresh flavors of hot coffee in an ice-cold drink. I wrote about ice brew last summer, and while I liked the coffee just fine, I was unconvinced. I’m returning to it this year because the clash between cold brew and ice brew is heating up.

It’s a good fight. On the cold brew side you have and Blue Bottle Coffee and Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Toby’s Estate Coffee. Birch Coffee sells cold brew coffee at the Madison Square Eats street market, Kickstand delivers it by bike, and Grady’s Cold Brew ships nationwide. Joe serves cold brew, as does Café Grumpy, Kaffe 1668, Third Rail Coffee and dozens of others.

On the ice brew side you have Counter Culture Coffee and George Howell Coffee, Ritual Coffee Roasters and Wrecking Ball Coffee. Ice brew is harder to track down in coffee shops, but it’s there if you look: it’s on the menu at Au Breve, Café Integral and Sweetleaf.

Right now, cold brew has the momentum. It’s easy to drink, easy to make and easy to package in stylish bottles. And it’s easy to understand why it’s so popular: it tastes good. Even the haters agree that cold brew is velvety, sweet and has almost no acidity.

Actually, that lack of acidity is the problem. Coffee has good acids (e.g., malic, phosphoric) and less-good acids (e.g., acetic, quinic). You want to develop the good acids and minimize the others. In fact, a crisp snap of acid is not only one of the most desirable characteristics of many great coffees, but of many great flavors: strawberries, rieslings, gimlets. The Kenyan, Ethiopian and other African coffees harvested earlier this year that are now making their way onto the shelves are prized for their dazzling acidity. Why ignore what makes them so special?

This is where the iced coffee debate becomes a schism.

Last month, Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee posted a thoughtful position paper in favor of ice brew (which he calls “Japanese ice method,” and which others call “flash cooled”); Lorenzo Perkins of Cuvee Coffee, who wrote about cold brew for Barista, responded here; Nicholas Cho of Wrecking Ball Coffee replied to Perkins here; and Jaime van Schyndel of Barismo thinks more should use the Cambridge technique. Some swear by kits, like the Hario Fretta or the Kalita Ice-N-Hot. Reactions ricocheted through the twitterverse and the blogosphere.

Cold brew might have the popular vote, but ice brew is bigger with the pundits.

I have a sentimental attachment to cold brew. I first came across it when I was living in New Orleans in the mid-1990s, and I have Kodachrome memories of sitting in the backyard with a plastic Mardi Gras cup full of milky cold brew coffee (you always cut the concentrate with pure milk, never water, unless under orders from your doctor), and thinking that between the honeysuckle blooming that morning and the music I heard the night before there’s no sweeter city in the world.

It was with that bias that I went to Counter Culture Coffee’s New York training lab for a taste-off: cold brew versus ice brew. We used the same coffee for both methods, a few versions of each. To my surprise, I came away a convert — the ice brew was bright, lively, crisp, nuanced. To put it simply, it’s what I want to drink.

I should note that ice brew tastes terrible with milk, while cold brew complements the rich sweetness of dairy. In my opinion, cold brew is at its best when it’s prepared New Orleans style and made with full-fat milk so that it tastes like melted coffee ice cream. (Even the purists at Counter Culture Coffee smiled when they tried it.) But cold brew without the milk didn’t measure up to ice brew. I don’t care if some say it jumped the shark. It was drab in comparison, like listening to the in-flight movie through the airline’s headphones.

Whether or not that matters to you depends on the movie. And the coffee. Recently, I made ice brew with the Dukunde Kawa from Rwanda by Handsome Coffee Roasters, and it tasted like lemonade — it hit all the notes at the bright end of the spectrum, a clean and refreshing cup. A coffee that pretty shouldn’t be cold brewed.

This summer, I’m ice brewing; maybe it’ll catch on in New York in the next few years, and become the next “it” coffee.